PHOTO COURTESY OF INTELLIGENT TRENCH As head of public-realm city planning, Martin Whittles manages 20,000 street openings a year for Westminster, U.K. To reduce the number of openings, the London-area municipality is investing in a web-based system that allows utilities to work together to build a digital map that pinpoints specific belowground assets.“One of our biggest problems is congestion of public works and unnecessary damage to the streets by repeatedly opening the same patch of ground,” says Whittles. “At least 20% of the openings the utilities are making are exploratory.”To avoid this redundant work, Whittles is adopting Intelligent Trench for

  Drywall Calculator Jeremy Breaux Price: 99¢Platforms: iPhoneThis app makes relatively simple calculations even simpler. To figure out how many sheets of drywall will be necessary for a given room, all the user has to do is input the height and perimeter of the walls and the length and width of the ceiling. The tool can exclude some areas of the room and allow for slope. The app gives total drywall area in square feet and tallies the number of 4-ft-wide by variable-height sections needed. Users must enter fractions as decimal points, which one app reviewer thought preposterous. n9/11 MemorialNational

Preliminary data sampling from a prototype system that blends observations, weather forecasts and combined water models with decision support tools to predict storm flood heights in coastal areas shows that, during the passage of Hurricane Irene, the system made highly accurate predictions in the sampled locations.

Anoto Technologies Anoto Technologies' infrared digital pen records the movements it makes on any of several thousand printable patterns. Anoto Technologies After trying their options, contractors supporting federal responders in a recent disaster mission say infrared digital pens are the most useful tool for rapidly collecting and distributing massive amounts of damage-assessment data.“Using the pen has cut the time it takes to collect and distribute our field data by 85%,” says William Spiking, a geographic information systems specialist for Tetra Tech Inc., Pasadena, Calif. Spiking manages a team that provides technical assistance to the Federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund Technical

Remote access company LogMeIn has launched a beta test of software that promises to give tech support administrators the power to manage file access permissions on Apple phones and iPads in the field.The company says the software enables companies to implement policies that control what's being accessed, by whom and from what device. In addition, it says the software can enroll individually owned or company- procured iOS devices into a firm's mobile inventory.It also simplifies how iOS devices are configured for remote access to one or more company computers, including how they gain access to corporate applications and files. In

Frank Bennardo, president of Engineering Express, which specializes in product evaluations, is on a mission to help speed product approval information. He thinks ApprovalZoom.com can help users get information faster.ApprovalZoom is compiling a collective registry of all building products. “We accept all building products that have some sort of approval rating,” he says.The objective, according to Bennardo, is to deliver powerful search engine results that sift through mountains of building products (more than 90,000 and counting) and group them by each approval standard they match, or fail to match.The site is now expanding to become the largest online collection of

Three recent app releases aim to raise the bar on roof-estimating tools. Two of them are free and modest in function, although one reaches for the stars. The other is pricey and complex by app standards. Photo by Tom Sawyer PITCH PERFECT Pitch Gauge 2.0 has a calculator that converts measurements into estimates of materials. One roofing contractor calls it a must-have. At the modest end of the spectrum is a roof-pitch-measuring app called Pitch Gauge 2.0, which came out this month for Android smart phones. The app, also available for the iPhone, uses the smart phone's gyroscope to read

Inspired by the need to prevent employees who are working on far-flung project teams from entering inaccurate time and deficient information, the developer of a punch-clock application has linked its newest version to an evolving security feature. “The biometric fingerprint technology is our most important update. It adds the security of knowing an employee must be present to log their own hours,” says Michael Fullerton, president of CyberMatrix Corp., Vernon, British Columbia, Canada. “A lot of mobile tablets already have this fingerprint hardware built into the device.”The seventh version of CyberMatrix's Employee Project Clock, which has been out for two

Engineers who need to integrate river-flow analysis data with 3D civil design models recently got a boost with the release of a new extension that ties them together. Until the end of the year, Autodesk Labs is offering Project River Analysis Extension software for free as a sort of trial balloon. The software integrates with AutoCAD Civil 3D and AutoCAD Map 3D for 2012. Photo courtesy of Autodesk, Inc. A screen shot of Autodesk's new River Analysis Extension, which is on Autodesk Labs' site and free until the end of this year. The latest extension can overlay one-dimensional data from

A new app displays the load capacities of various shackles and slings, such as wire rope, chain, nylon web and round. Screen shot courtesy of RigIT. A new app displays the load capacities of various shackles and slings, such as wire rope, chain, nylon web and round.RigIT LLC, San Francisco, released the app RigIT for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch on June 8, 2011.“I have my rigging charts on a sticker inside my hardhat,” says Perry Churchill, safety manager with Bragg Crane Co., Long Beach, Calif. “But some of my charts only go up to a certain width, like